In the third and final part of our series on the future of GM crops in Wales Pembrokeshire potato farmer Walter Simon explainswhat excites his interestin them

WHEN I am asked why I am interested in and supportive of the idea of genetic modification it goes to the core of being a food producer.

I cannot restrict myself to viewing Great Britain in isolation. We need to import some foodstuffs and to export some, as all countries do.

We are therefore influenced by the world market and cannot be isolated from it. The stark fact that we produce only 75% of our consumption of foods that can be produced in the UK is testament to that.

The world's population is six billion and a large proportion are below the poverty line and a significant number are undernourished. In 50 years the United Nations forecast it to be nine billion.

We need to increase our global food production, both by reducing losses from the field to plate and by increasing field production. We need greater levels of production. We need diverse ways of controlling pests, from hand labour, mechanical, chemicals and GM technology.

How do we produce food? In Great Britain, as in many Western countries, we have strictly-controlled pesticides and application regulations to protect both consumers of food and the pesticide handlers and applicators.

In the developing world they do not have these safeguards and many people, especially the farmers or employees, are killed by excessive exposure to old and dangerous pesticides.

It is a fact that in many cases the food producers are not able to access the latest pesticides and have to rely on products that have been withdrawn from use in the West, some because of their toxicity.

They also have little or no protective clothing to reduce exposure levels.

I have seen workers in shorts spraying coffee (and themselves) with knapsack sprayers and heard about the numbers of deaths and levels of sickness in the workers.

There is also the aspect of hand labour. A lot of work in the developing world is done by hand: weeding and pest control.

These people have aspirations to get away from these dangers and drudgery as we have, and they see GM as offering them one way of achieving this.

There is a big demand for GM crops in the developing world. There is a problem in getting the technology to them because of the cost of developing it.

This is starting to be addressed by the biotech companies and the public sector. The food producers see a great opportunity. They can reduce their exposure to the more dangerous pesticides and protect their crops from some pests that they had no defence against and so improve the harvestable yield and quality.

Their governments are wary, though, because of our (Europe's) refusal to accept GM crops. The governments are concerned that if they adopt GM technology they might be jeopardising their trade with Europe.

We have to accept that our decisions have an effect beyond our borders and have an implication on food production practices in other areas of the world.

Risks, of course there are risks. There are risks in everything we do.

This is not to belittle the risks, but we have not seen any problems from eight years of GM crop use in North America.

We have been using many medicines, including insulin and vaccines, produced by GM bacteria for years without problems.

The European Commission has described GM crops as safer than conventional varieties because of the stringent testing and regulations they have to pass.

Modern food production reacts to consumers' demands for perfect produce and so the levels of imperfection that are acceptable today are vastly lower than in the past.

Food producers now have to control pests to a greater degree.

Sweetcorn has to be sprayed 10 times with insecticide to produce an acceptable product. With GM this could be reduced to one. Cotton is the most sprayed crop in the world. GM cotton has reduced the amount of pesticide used on this crop in the USA alone by 2,000 tonnes.

Consumers want fewer pesticides but are not prepared to pay for organic produce; GM gives them cheap food and reduced pesticide use.

I believe that when the public realises the advantages that this technology can provide they will accept it.

I do not believe that GM is the perfect answer or that there are not uses for this technology that are inappropriate.

All technologies have inappropriate uses, but that does not stop us from looking at and using them for the benefit of mankind.

We need strong and robust regulations to make sure that the products that are used in Great Britain are the correct ones for our circumstances but a blanket ban, I feel, is inappropriate and untenable.

We have to encourage the responsible development of this technology to reap the rewards that it can offer.